[1999]

In order to precisely define the term useful I'd have to wade into the murky depths of philosophy, which I don't want to do.

I was suggesting that philosophers would like to reason about my scenario because it would be a lot more interesting than imagining you could build a car that would somehow be forced to choose between running over i.e. ten elderly people or two children, and speculating about who you would program the car to kill. I know my scenario leads to a lot of interesting questions -- unlike the scenarios proposed by the website.

But I reject the claim that any reasoning about the scenario is necessarily philosophy. That's just what philosophers want you to think. For example, imagine if philosophers studied the behaviour of ducks and called it duckosophy. When a duck observes another duck, is that duckosophy? I would say no. The duck would do that even if humans never existed. The relationship is asserted purely on the side of the philosophers. So, I am a non-philosopher, and I reason about things based on knowledge due to lots of other non-philosophers, I'm not engaging in philosophy, even if a bunch of uninvolved people want to assert so.